Lenny's Podcast: Just evil enough: Subversive marketing strategies for startups | Alistair Croll

☑ Think Subversively for Go-to-Market
↳ Go beyond standard growth hacks. Find tactics that set you apart.
↳ Look for strategies that leverage the system in ways it wasn’t designed for.

☑ Shift Focus to Market Positioning
↳ You need an unfair advantage to capture people’s attention.
↳ Challenge the usual "product-market fit" by exploring “product-medium-market” dynamics.

☑ Explore Unconventional Marketing
↳ Netflix used the USPS like a high-latency broadband network for DVDs before broadband was widespread.
↳ Gymshark used Cameo to make “Gymshark” a celebrity persona on social media.

☑ Embrace Subversive Tactics to Grow
↳ Don’t rely on “just another feature”—find what gets your market's attention.
↳ Look for loopholes in systems that give you a leg up on competitors.

People overlook this often. Sometimes people are not buying your product because it's only half of the solution

The reality is that the only thing that matters is do you have an unfair advantage? Have you figured out a way to capture attention and turn it into profitable demand?

It's not that they did something evil. It's that they did something to use a system in a way its creators didn't intend

The key is to go find your own. And I think that finding that go-to-market strategy, that unfair, unprecedented, we call them zero-day marketing exploits, is as important as building the right product feature

One of my favorite examples of system awareness is a Stanford prof named Tina Selig...the winning class sold its three minutes to a company that wanted to recruit Stanford grads

The trick is to find these kinds of approaches that are fundamental to your business model. And for that, you have to look at how do you differentiate?

The strength of your cards isn't how you win in poker...you win by bluffing. You win by subterfuge. You win by looking for your opponent's tells

When people talk about positioning, they often look at the dimensions of it and say, how do we compete on those? The dimension only matters if a lucrative, reachable target market thinks that it is the dominant criteria for deciding about the product

We like the term zero-day marketing exploits because it's the difference between a growth hacker and someone who is genuinely trying to subvert the dynamics of the industry they're in

If you're talking to an investor and you don't have a zero-day go-to-market exploit that creates attention and turns it into sustainable, lucrative demand, you are probably going to fail

Sometimes the buyer upgrade is like getting out of your own way

A hedge fund is an organization formed to discover something that will be illegal and do it until it is

If you are a hippie natural person, you reject clinical science and you reject traditional beauty norms. So you're orthogonal to both sex appeal and healthcare, and it's a perfect position

I think the motto that informs things the most that I work on these days is: it's amazing what can get done when nobody cares who gets credit

Spend some time thinking about how to be disagreeable, understanding the system you're in, then use the need for novelty and disagreeability to temporarily let yourself think like a supervillain

A growth hack traditionally is sort of product agnostic...We like the term zero-day marketing exploits because it's the difference between a growth hacker and someone who is genuinely trying to subvert the dynamics of the industry they're in

We think that subversiveness is a skill you can learn. We spend a lot of time understanding it, talking to neuroscientists, and finding examples throughout history

To give the customer a different set of dimensions...reframing isn't just about competing on existing dimensions; it's about giving the customer a different set of dimensions

What has technology done to change the relative risk and the relative fungibility of each of those steps? And I think for any organization, re-evaluating the processes that you assume are correct based on what technology has made hard or easy

It's this whole strategy. Product managers...our tendency is to want to make the product just one more feature...the reality is your product may already be a perfect fit for a market you're ignoring

Bait and switch can be evil unless the buyer is delighted with the thing you've switched them for, or you also deliver the thing you promised

Being able to reframe things. I mean, I mentioned liquid death. But when people talk about positioning, they often look at the dimensions of it and say, how do we compete on those?